This footage tells the tale:
How direct is the connection between what President Donald Trump communicated to his supporters and their actions in laying siege to the U.S. Capitol? Videos recorded by many individuals over the course of the day provide some answers. A portion of these videos have not been seen widely before, including video footage largely from the platform Parler showing how the crowd reacted in real time to some of the most potent lines in Trump’s speech at the Ellipse. The videos, along with other information in the public record, provide strong evidence of a causal link between Trump’s messages to his supporters and their dangerous, illegal conduct. The collection of videos, viewed chronologically, also shows the ways in which Trump placed the life of Vice President Mike Pence, among others, in grave danger.
What’s revealed by these videos is not only relevant to the impeachment trial of Trump, where the House has charged that Trump “willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged—and foreseeably resulted—in lawless action at the Capitol.” The video evidence may also be relevant to an investigation by the Attorney General of the District of Columbia for potential incitement to riot. And it may be relevant down the road to other federal prosecutors. Ultimately, the greatest relevance of these videos will be how parts of the public understands the events of the day, and how history records it.
Below is the video followed by reactions to it from former senior Justice Department officials and former federal prosecutors.
The video segments sourced from Parler include a number of clips made publicly available previously by ProPublica, as well as separate footage that has not been widely referenced in the news media that was made available for download following the much publicized scraping of publicly available information from the Parler site.
Click over to the link at Just Security to see various legal opinions about what this means for Trump’s defense in the impeachment. Here’s just one:
Andrew Weissmann (@AWeissmann_), lead prosecutor in Robert S. Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office, former Chief of the Fraud Section in the Department of Justice, and former General Counsel for the FBI:
Under the criminal law, a person is presumed to intend the natural and foreseeable consequences of his actions. What happened on 1/6 meets both prongs to establish criminal intent for incitement. Moreover, If Trump did not intend there to be violent rioting, his actions during and after the violence would have been abject horror and strenuous efforts to stem and condemn the violence. That did not occur.
Greg Sargent on McConnell’s power grab:
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is refusing to allow Democrats to take control of the Senate. In so doing, the minority leader is banking on a twisted convention of political reporting that he knows will play to his advantage.
Specifically, McConnell has calculated that the press will place the onus of achieving bipartisan cooperation on President Biden, while allowing Republicans to cast their own withholding of bipartisan cooperation as proof of Biden’s failure to achieve it.
We know this because we have already seen McConnell operate from this playbook. He has been quite open about how it works. And this fact should shift the way the entire public discussion about McConnell’s strategy proceeds.
McConnell is employing a simple but deceptive scam that has hoodwinked a lot of people for a long time. The central ruse is that McConnell piously holds up the filibuster as a tool for securing bipartisan cooperation.
In reality, however, McConnell himself uses the filibuster in precisely the opposite way: to facilitate the partisan withholding of cooperation to an extraordinary extent, for largely instrumental ends.
McConnell is now locked in a standoff with Senate Democrats. He is demanding that they commit in advance to keeping the legislative filibuster in place as his extortion price for allowing an agreement on the Senate’s operating rules.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has rejected this demand. While it’s unlikely Democrats will end the filibuster as long as moderates such as Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.V.) oppose it, they won’t commit to this up front: They want to preserve this option if McConnell obstructs everything on Biden’s agenda.
The result is that the Senate has largely ground to a halt. Committees remain in GOP control, and the Biden agenda remains to some degree in limbo, with the fate of more controversial nominees and his proposed new economic rescue package remaining uncertain.
The Post has some new reporting on McConnell’s thinking:The calculations for McConnell, according to Republicans, are simple. Not only is preserving the filibuster a matter that Republicans can unify around, it is something that potentially divides Democrats, who are under enormous pressure to discard it to advance their governing agenda.“Republicans very much appreciate the consistency and the rock-solid fidelity to the norms and rules that make the Senate a moderating force in policymaking,” said Scott Jennings, a former McConnell aide. “The legislative filibuster is the last rule driving bipartisanship in Washington.”
As it happens, this hasn’t yet “divided” Democrats, who appear united behind the idea that they cannot allow McConnell to bluff them into forgoing their main point of leverage over him.
But if Democrats do need fortifying in this regard, here’s a place to start. When McConnell’s spinners claim that he wants to keep the filibuster to facilitate bipartisanship and moderation, it’s knee-slappingly laughable. McConnell himself has shown us otherwise.
In an interview with journalist Joshua Green in 2011, McConnell explained exactly why he was expanding use of the filibuster and other procedural tactics against even noncontroversial aspects of President Barack Obama’s agenda. He said:“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” McConnell says. “Because we thought — correctly, I think — that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”
This deserves renewed attention in the current context. McConnell’s core insight was that there would be a major downside for Republicans if even a handful of GOP senators reached compromises with a Democratic president — even if the Democratic president made meaningful concessions to them in the process.AD
That’s because it would bolster the notion that the Democratic president had successfully bridged disagreement with Republicans. McConnell wanted to avoid that outcome, regardless of whether the compromises reached were reasonable or salutary ones by the lights of the crossover Republicans themselves.
In McConnell’s wielding, then, the filibuster facilitated the prevention of outbreaks of bipartisanship. It isn’t just that in many cases it blocked Senate Democrats from governing despite having the majority. It also set up standoffs in which refusing to reach compromises with a Democratic president fulfilled the instrumental goal of casting him as a failed leader.
There is very little doubt that McConnell intends to do the same to Biden wherever possible. In fact, as Brian Beutler suggests, by holding Senate action hostage right now — all to leverage Democrats into unilateral disarmament in the face of future filibustering — McConnell is already doing this.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders is running for Governor of Arkansas and the polling shows her to be leading. This was a job previously a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton, among others including her father, who was Lieutenant Governor and ran for president twice. The man who holds the job today, ASA Hutchinson, is a former US Attorney, DEA administrator and DHS deputy as well as being a US Congressman. There have been other less impressive people in the job, but none will be as unimpressive as Sarah Huckabee Sanders if she wins. Her resume consists of being a low level campaign worker and Trump’s press secretary where she did the most abysmal job ever until Kayleigh McEneny came along.
It is highly unusual for anyone with that experience to run for office much less an executive position like Governor but considering that GOP QAnon believers are winning seats in the US Congress being the daughter of a former Governor and Fox News star and lying for Donald Trump may just be the best qualification you can have as a Republican.
The following is from Dan Pfeiffer’s newsletter. It makes sense. It’s already clear that Mitch McConnell is determined to continue to dictate the agenda, the right wingers in the Senate have no intention of recognizing their minority status and the “moderates” have decided that they were elected to run the country instead of the the Democrats. We’re going to party like it’s 2009 unless the Democrats move quickly to change the dynamic:
Many people have made very compelling political and substantive arguments about why the filibuster should be eliminated. During his eulogy for Congressman John Lewis, former President Obama referred to the filibuster as a “relic of the Jim Crow era.” If Jim Crow relic isn’t a sufficient argument to convince you that the filibuster should be ditched, you probably have some thinking to do. Ezra Klein takes the argument one step further in a recent column in the New York Times to make the case that eliminating the filibuster is essential to Democratic success in 2022 and beyond:
[Democrats] have plenty of ideas that could improve people’s lives and strengthen democracy. But they have, repeatedly, proved themselves more committed to preserving the status quo of the political system than fulfilling their promises to voters. They have preferred the false peace of decorum to the true progress of democracy. If they choose that path again, they will lose their majority in 2022, and they will deserve it.
The question of WHY the filibuster should be eliminated is quite clear (thanks Mitch!), but the question of HOW it gets eliminated is much more difficult. All it takes to change a senate rule is a majority of Senators. Democrats have a majority of Senators (thanks Trump), so it should be easy right?
Nope.
Despite the compelling columns, well-formed arguments, and the many, many tweets, there is a lot of work to do to eliminate the filibuster and enact the progressive policies the American people support.
Here are some thoughts on how to get it done:
Build the case:
The conversations around the filibuster are often arcane and esoteric — steeped in language about majoritarian rule and Senate tradition. That’s all well and good, but it’s not persuasive to a broader public who pays passing attention (at best) to politics. The arguments for filibuster elimination need to transition from theory to practice. Democrats need to build a case against the filibuster by demonstrating time and again how the Republicans are using the filibuster to block policies supported by a bipartisan majority of Americans.
When Joe Biden released his COVID and Economic Relief package, Republicans howled like stuck pigs because it included a provision to increase the minimum wage to $15. They called it divisive. Some news outlets referred to it as pandering to an antsy liberal base. This is absurd. A Pew Poll from 2019 found that a $15 minimum wage was supported by two-thirds of Americans. In November, Florida voters approved a ballot measure to increase the state’s minimum wage to $15 with more than 60 percent of the vote. Biden’s minimum wage proposal is a piece of mainstream legislation that will almost certainly be blocked by a minority of Senators. Whether they pay a price for that obstruction is up to us.
Democrats need a series of confrontations on issues like the minimum wage to build our case against the filibuster. In the coming weeks, the Democratic House is expected to pass a substantial democracy and government reform bill. Unlike much of Biden’s COVID relief plan, almost none of the democracy bill will be eligible for the 50-vote budget reconciliation process. Therefore, the Senate Republicans will certainly use the filibuster to block it.
After each and every obstruction, the people who oppose the filibuster must shout a two-part message from the rooftops. First, a minority of Republican Senators are blocking a mainstream and much-needed policy AND that Democratic Senators have the power to overcome that obstacle.
The message works best when there are specific, real-time examples to which to point.
Use the right language:
Almost no one knows what the word filibuster means and fewer know how it works. If we want to persuade Senators to eliminate the filibuster, we need to persuade their constituents it is a good idea. That means using language that people understand. In other words, say “filibuster” less.
A recent Navigator poll found that only half of respondents say they understand the filibuster “well,” including only one in five who say they understand it “very well.” However, 60 percent of Americans, 75 percent of Democrats, and even 46 percent of Republicans believe that getting rid of the filibuster would have a positive impact when it is referred to as a “loophole that allows a small minority of U.S. senators to block legislation.”
This loophole framing is key and should be how we talk, tweet, and post about the issue going forward. Additionally, the poll found that support for filibuster elimination went up when it was explained that it made policies more likely to pass. Passing COVID Relief, background checks for firearms, and infrastructure spending each caused more than 50 percent of respondents to be more likely to support getting rid of the filibuster.
Put more of the onus on McConnell:
While the work of activists is rightly focused on persuading Democrats to do the right thing, we can’t let Mitch McConnell off the hook. How McConnell plays his weak hand will be the biggest factor in whether the filibuster gets eliminated. We need to focus on his obstruction. We need to push back on his self-created image as some Senate institutionalist. Let’s not forget that one of the first things McConnell did after Trump was elected was eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees to jam through Neil Gorsuch to fill the seat that McConnell stole from President Obama.
The Capitol Hill press corps who is complicit in glorifying McConnell’s destructive behavior treats his obstruction as an immutable condition. In their mind, the only question that matters is how Democrats overcome it. We can’t buy into that framing. We have to actively push back against it and put more of the onus on McConnell for why things aren’t working.
Ultimately, McConnell can obstruct Biden or he can preserve the filibuster, but he can’t do both. And that is how we should frame it. The filibuster is in McConnell’s hands. If he wants to work with President Biden and the Democrats in a bipartisan manner, the filibuster likely survives. If McConnell treats Biden like he treated Obama, the filibuster could be gone.
On Saturday night, Jon Favreau asked the following question on Twitter.
The responses ranged from pushing Biden to solve the problem to an array of large infrastructure projects in West Virginia named after Manchin. In a 50-50 senate, Democrats have zero margin of error. As a conservative Democrat with a reputation for bucking the party, Manchin may be the most powerful person in Washington other than Joe Biden. The Manchin question is challenging because he is immune to a lot of the typical pressure points. He was just reelected. He isn’t concerned about a primary challenge from the Left. He is not influenced by criticism from the left. In fact, being hammered on Pod Save America, the Rachel Maddow Show and other progressive media likely helps him more than it hurts him in deeply red West Virginia.
My response to Jon’s question is don’t worry about Manchin … for now. Joe Manchin is the hardest vote to get, but he isn’t the only one. Kyrsten Sinema and Diane Feinstein are also publicly opposed to getting rid of the filibuster. There are undoubtedly many others undecided or quietly opposed. We should go about persuading the other Senators first. Get more and more of them on the record opposing the filibuster. Every additional Senator makes the next one more likely. There needs to be a bandwagon effect. Change on these procedural issues happens slowly and then suddenly. Manchin is not gettable now, but he might be later. Obsessing over his vote obscures the work that needs to be done right now.
Join the grassroots efforts:
The folks at Indivisible are working to build a grassroots movement to push for democracy reform. Any effort to fix our democracy depends on eliminating the filibuster. You can read more about their plan here.
Fix our Senate is a campaign working to get rid of the filibuster and make Washington, DC a state (which can only happen if there is no filibuster). You can learn about their effort and sign their petition here.
The filibuster may seem like an odd thing to obsess over during a pandemic, a recession, and after an insurrection. But there is no other option. After nearly a decade, Democrats finally have the power to improve people’s lives and enact progressive policies. Right now we have one hand tied behind our back. When the voters go to the polls in 2022, I would rather they judge us for what we did than what Mitch McConnell stopped us from doing.
Getting rid of the filibuster is not easy. But it can be done. It’s not enough to just yell about those who disagree. We have to do the work.
This seems like a good plan. They might also point out to the recalcitrant Democrats that if there is no filibuster, each one of them becomes the most powerful person in the Senate with a 50-50 majority. That’s not optimal for progressive change but it’s far better than allowing the Republicans to dictate policy from the minority.
They need to do this as soon as possible. Rip the band-aid off. The country can’t afford to wait. People are dying.
It took a little longer for the inevitable post-election Republican implosion than might have been expected. Perhaps they were exhausted from all the excitement of witnessing a historic violent insurrection or maybe they are just aimless without former President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed to guide them. It’s possible they were a little bit gun-shy since people are being investigated for committing sedition all over the country after their assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. Whatever the reason, the normally voluble Republicans went uncharacteristically quiet for a few days during Joe Biden’s Inauguration week. That silence ended over the weekend after two state Republican parties decided it was time to deal with the traitors in their midst.
In Arizona, the party reelected Kelli Ward — a Trump fanatic who lost her bid for the GOP nomination to the Senate in 2018— as the state chairman and her first order of business was to offer a censure motion against a raft of prominent Republicans, including former Senator Jeff Flake, Cindy McCain, the wife of former Senator John McCain and sitting Governor Steve Ducey, all for the crime of failing to be properly loyal to Donald Trump. The first two are vocal critics and didn’t vote for Trump, but Gov. Ducey has been a loyal minion whose only crime was refusing to break the law and somehow give Donald Trump more votes in the election.
Meanwhile, the Republican State Central Committee of Kentucky met on Saturday to vote on a resolution demanding that Minority Leader Mitch McConnell support former President Donald Trump and condemn his second impeachment. The resolution failed on procedural grounds but the people who brought it up say they plan to bring another motion demanding McConnell’s resignation. There is no chance that will pass either. Mitch McConnell is the most powerful Republican in the federal government and the Kentucky political establishment knows that. But both of these events reveal that Trump loyalty remains a potent force in the party.
It also illustrates the bind that Mitch McConnell finds himself in.
Polling shows that a large majority of Republicans are still in thrall to Trump to be sure, but somewhere between one-fifth and one-fourth of the party has fallen away. A Pew poll taken after the insurrection found that more than 30% of Republicans disapprove of Trump. That may not seem like much but it is enough to make it impossible for Republicans to win nationally if those people fall away from the GOP permanently. As the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein put it, “if Biden could lastingly attract even a significant fraction of the Republican voters dismayed over the riot, it would constitute a seismic change in the political balance of power.”
Nobody knows that better than Mitch McConnell who just lost four Senate seats in Arizona and Georgia, states that were solid red not long ago. Those kind of wins are predictable in purple states like Colorado (which the Republicans also lost) but losing four seats in Arizona and Georga is a harbinger of big problems for the GOP in metro and suburban areas around the country. And after what happened on Jan. 6th, Trump and his agitated, radical following are very likely to make things even worse. In that Pew Poll, 43% of Republicans said they do not want Trump to remain a major political figure.
It has long been obvious that Mitch McConnell doesn’t care for Donald Trump. He’s a big pain in the neck if nothing else and McConnell understands that a leader who can never get above 50% approval is not someone they can count on to deliver for the party. In fact, Trump never did. He barely pulled out an electoral college win in 2016, lost in 2020 and lost both the House and the Senate during his only term. It’s not a good record.
McConnell gave a strong speech condemning the move to object to the electoral votes before the riot started on Jan. 6th, even making the point that the election was “not unusually close.” And after the attack, he floated several trial balloons in the mainstream press to test out the appetite for convicting Trump in a second impeachment trial. He’s made it clear that his senators are free to vote their conscience and even gave a speech on the floor saying “the mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the President and other powerful people.”
But before we get too excited about this born again, patriotic Mitch McConnell, let’s not forget that he declined to step up and say that the election was decided until very late in the game and then held back from his criticism until the Georgia runoff elections were over, just in case he got to keep the majority. He, along with all the other GOP leaders, allowed Trump’s Big Lie to spread and metastasize into a massive conspiracy theory that led hundreds of people to storm the Capitol. And for four years, knowing what Trump was didn’t stop McConnell from using the power he had while he had it. Just because Trump was driving the party into the ditch was no reason not to confirm a whole bunch of right-wing judges and pass some huge tax cuts, am I right? He even went out of his way to make sure that Trump stayed in office when the Democrats conveniently offered him a way to get rid of him and replace him with good old, reliable right-wing Mike Pence. McConnell made that deal with the devil and he’s scrambling to figure out what to do about old Beelzebub now that he’s on the outside looking in.
McConnell isn’t the only member of the GOP leadership who is dancing as fast as he can either.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, one of the most verbally incontinent politicians in Washington, doesn’t know which way to turn either. At first, he said Trump won the election and he voted to overturn the electoral college, then turned around and said Trump bears some responsibility for the insurrection, then reversed himself and said Trump didn’t provoke it and finally laid the blame at the feet of all Americans.
The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump are being threatened including Liz Cheney who is in danger of losing her leadership role in the caucus. The House Republicans are all at McCarthy’s, and each other’s, throats.
And nobody knows what they’re going to do about the Senate impeachment trial. Some Republicans would like to draw it out and make it a Trumpian spectacle, while McConnell would prefer not to have Trump back in the spotlight. And now there may even be some jockeying for power within the Senate leadership:
McConnell has plenty of tricks up his sleeves and it’s unlikely Cornyn is actually maneuvering. But it’s been years since they had this much tension within their caucus and he may not be able to control his fractious bunch of Trumpish radicals like Josh Hawley, R-Mo, Ted Cruz, R-Tx, and Lindsey Graham, R-SC, who is strangely obsessed with defending Trump far beyond what is politically useful. I hope the Democrats are prepared to battle a party that’s in disarray. It may not be as easy as it seems.
An old roommate had a 19th century medical text in his collection. A section on amputations was written so breezily that (approximately) “unless you are a fool or an idiot” anyone could do it. During the Black Plague outbreak of 1347 – 1350, proposed treatments for that included:
* Rubbing onions, herbs or a chopped up snake (if available) on the boils or cutting up a pigeon and rubbing it over an infected body.
* Drinking vinegar, eating crushed minerals, arsenic, mercury or even ten-year-old treacle!
As we struggle with a 21st century plague, William Saletan worries that a threat Donald Trump unleashed greater than himself is “an all-out attack on the principle that facts must be respected.”
Saletan writes, “What Trump has brought to the United States is ruthless, relentless, denialist propaganda at a scale we used to see only in dictatorships.”
Progressives and conservatives have long debated what is and is not. What is objective fact verses what constitutes spin, truthiness or “true facts.” But propaganda has overtaken public debate and click-worthy online content to the point that reality these days is something akin to “choose your own adventure.” Objective fact is a “do your research” activity for QAnons and others who don’t simply accept the reality presented them by a trusted propagandist. For heaven’s sake, Trump proposed trying injecting patients with disinfectant to cure COVID-19.
Science that allowed us to leave behind bloodletting and chopped-up snakes and pigeons cures is under attack:
Why is science so effective? Because it constantly tests its theories against reality. It seeks out, accepts, and learns from falsification. That’s what Vice President Kamala Harris, in remarks last week, said she had learned from her mother, an endocrinologist: “She instilled in me a fundamental belief in the importance of collecting and analyzing data, facts, of forming a hypothesis, and recognizing that it’s not a failure to reevaluate that hypothesis when the facts don’t add up.” In science, discovering you were wrong isn’t failure. It’s progress.
Scientists take this process of testing and reevaluation for granted. To them, it’s common sense. But it’s more than that. It’s an ethic. No law of nature forces you to test your theories against evidence or to admit, when those theories don’t check out, that you were wrong. Scientists concede error, often grudgingly, because their peers demand it. Science has a culture of falsification.
Politics doesn’t. When political promises don’t pan out—wars turn into quagmires, public schools underperform, or tax cuts fail to pay for themselves—politicians invent excuses. This has always been a problem, but it’s getting worse. Trump and his acolytes don’t just spin facts; they completely disregard them. They repeat fantastic lies about election fraud, and when they’re confronted with contrary evidence, they’re not even embarrassed.
It is tempting to tell Republicans just to go to hell, Saletan notes. The propagandists are predominantly on their side of the aisle. But they thrive on polarization. To combat this slide toward a new Dark Age, Saletan suggests “a fact-based alliance that crosses party lines.” It means crediting figures on the right when they speak fact:
It means supporting Sen. Mitt Romney, Rep. Liz Cheney, and other Republicans when they speak the truth. It means seriously engaging fact-based journalism at the Dispatch, the Bulwark, National Review, and other publications in the center and on the right. It means distinguishing the sins of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush from the pathologies of Trump and Newt Gingrich. In this fight, we need everyone who’s willing to play by the rules of deliberative democracy.
That kind of trust will have to be earned. But I am not averse to throwing non-cash “Scooby snacks” at them when they show they demonstrate they inhabit the same century as I do.
This republic from its inception aspired to be a place where all are “created equal.” The United States has struggled for its entire history to live up to that vision. The founders envisioned a republic built on popular sovereignty, a rejection of vestigial feudalism still hanging on in Europe (and elsewhere). Of course, the phrase used at the time was “all men are created equal,” and that meant something. There were influential women such as Elizabeth Willing Powel at the founding of the republic, of course, but it was still a man’s world, a white man’s world.
Dark bargains surrounding the status of darker-skinned people enslaved to enrichen white men of the South were required to gain southern ratification of the 1787 constitution. As our quadrennial headaches over the Electoral College remind us, those artifacts are with us still. Struggles to throw off the legacy of slavery and to make those two words, created equal, more than florid prose are, in plainer language, about who counts.
Since 1787, one group of Americans after the next has had to fight to have fellow Americans and the government acknowledge that they count.
Indeed, this year began with the first sacking of the Capitol since The War of 1812. The violent insurrection was incited by a sitting president and carried out by a mob of supporters convinced that the 74 million Americans who voted for Donald J. Trump count more than the 81 million who voted for Joe Biden. In swing state after swing state, Trump and his Keystone Cops team of attorneys argued that the votes of millions of Americans should not count at all.
Virtually any struggle for power or recognition of unrealized equal-ness is at its core an argument over who counts and who does not. Even if never stated in terms so blunt. Although, the legal wrangling over the last year over whom to count in the decennial census was as blunt as it gets. In the census, count means count. Literally.
When Reconstruction failed after the Civil War, emancipated slaves faced another century of repression, lynching, and denial of basic protections that were theirs by rights. Even a half-century after the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s, white America resists acknowledging that Black Americans count, or matter, not only as citizens but as human beings.
Suffragettes fought for over 70 years to have their voices count at the ballot box. The Nineteenth Amendment added to the Constitution in 1920 granted them the right to vote but full autonomy and equality in the workplace and on the street remains elusive.
Whether the issue is LGBTQ rights, womens’ rights, immigration, photo ID, gerrymandering and the myth of voter fraud, our conservative antagonists frame counter-arguments in terms that let them avoid publicly addressing this fundamental question: Who counts?
Digby on Sunday cited Jonathan Chait’s column about the indignant response on the right to President Biden’s inaugural “renunciation of racism and violent white-supremacist terrorism.” Figures such as Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson do not identify as white supremacists. But, Digby observed, their anger at Biden’s condemning white supremacy outs them as identifying with it. Because as Chait concludes, “Carlson, MacDonald and Paul heard Biden denounce white supremacy, and decided he was talking about them.”
Notice how often right-wing pundits and politicians name-check “Real Americans.” Native-born, straight white people who live in rural, red states and vote Republican are Real Americans. White blue-collar workers and farmers who vote Republican are Real Americans. White evangelical Christians who vote Republican are Real Americans. White Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, and rifle-toting militia members are Real Americans. Scan the MAGA crowds at Trump rallies or the faces of the extremists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
What conservatives mean by Real Americans is this: city-dwellers, Blacks, Latinos, immigrants, liberals … anyone not falling under the general categories in the paragraph above Do Not Count. They are lessers, lower-caste, second-class citizens at best, and most definitely not “created equal.” To them.
Real Americans count. All others count less. Two-hundred forty-five years after the Declaration, this country still struggles to rise above ancient feudal impulses to become the country of equals its founders imagined. Joe Biden embraces that vision. His conservative critics reject it. They insist they count more.
They are prepared to overthrow the republic to keep it that way.
This piece by Ezra Klein from 2017 features a quote from the new Chief of Staff Ron Klain that shows he had Trump’s number from the get:
A few weeks back, I wrote a piece about Donald Trump titled “How to stop an autocracy.” The essay began with the premise that Trump has a will to power and a contempt for the basic norms and institutions of American democracy, and then explored how to limit the damage. The answer, basically, was that Congress needs to do its damn job.
But after I wrote it, smart people argued the piece was built atop a mistake. Trump might have the will to power, but he doesn’t have the discipline for it. Grim scenarios suggesting his presidency would grow too strong missed the likelier scenario that it would be extremely weak.
Yuval Levin, editor of the journal National Affairs and a leading conservative intellectual, made the case to me over email:
I think the more plausible cause for worry is that he will be a dysfunctional president. He seems to have come in without a clear sense of the nature and character of the presidency in our system, and he’s not playing that role but rather using the presidency as a platform for playing the role he has always played. And for now the White House team seems to be reinforcing that rather than counteracting it. The result of that seems more likely to be dysfunction than autocracy.
Levin’s argument is convincing.
Trump’s White House is the picture of dysfunction. He isn’t focused or effective in his application of executive power. His staff is riven with infighting, inexperienced with the mechanics of government, and unable to corral their boss’s worst impulses. Trump’s slipshod executive orders are being easily batted back by courts, and his agenda hasn’t even made it to Congress yet. How is he going to go from here to strongman?
I felt better. And then I talked to Ron Klain.
Klain served as chief of staff to both Vice President Al Gore and Vice President Joe Biden. He led Hillary Clinton’s debate prep — which is to say, he was deeply involved in their effort to understand Trump’s psychology — and he was widely rumored to be the frontrunner for chief of staff in Clinton’s White House. He understands how government works, and I’ve always found him unusually sober in his view of it.
Klain had a theory that combined Trump’s authoritarian impulses and troubled White House management in a way I found hard to dismiss. In Klain’s view, it’s Trump’s dysfunctional relationship with the government that catalyzes his illiberal tendencies — the more he is frustrated by the system, the more he will turn on the system.
“If Trump became a full-fledged autocrat, it will not be because he succeeds in running the state,” Klain said. “It’s not going to be like Julius Caesar, where we thank him and here’s a crown. It’ll be that he fails, and he has to find a narrative for that failure. And it will not be a narrative of self-criticism. It will not be that he let you down. He will figure out who the villains are, and he will focus the public’s anger at them.”
As we learned this weekend, he tried very, very hard to be that autocrat as his presidency was in its death throes. He found a flunky in the DOJ who would happily do his bidding and came close to making him the acting Attorney General to carry it out. It was only the last vestiges of institutional integrity left in the DOJ that stopped it when the top echelon of the department said they would quit if he did it. He saw the writing on the wall. But I don’t think you have to be an oracle to know that if the election had come down to one state where we would be today.
Klain had Trump’s number from the beginning. Let’s hope he has the same insight into Trump’s collaborators because they’re still there doing their worst.
Years ago, I wrote about this phenomenon from a different angle and I called the political and media establishment “The Village” because they came to think of DC as the voice of the “average American.”
In this piece from 2000’s I was referring to The Washington Post’s David Broder, at the time the “dean” of the press corps. (Today it would probably be Dan Balz.)
Broder and others …venture out into the American landscape with a sort of pre-conceived notion of what defines “the people” that appears to have been formed by TV sit-coms in 1955. They seem to see extraordinary value in sitting in some diner with middle aged and older white men (sometimes a few women are included) to “ask them what they think.” And invariably these middle-aged white men say the country is going to hell in a handbasket and they want the government to do more and they hate paying taxes. There may be a little frisson of disagreement among these otherwise similar people on certain issues of the day because of their affiliation with a union or because of the war or certain social issues, but for the most part they all sit together and politely talk politics with this anthropologist/reporter, usually agreeing that this president or another one is a bum or a hero. The reporter takes careful notes of everything these “real Americans” have to say and take them back to DC and report them as the opinions of “the people.”
Meanwhile, someone like me, who lives in a big city on the west coast and who doesn’t hang out in diners with middle aged white men are used as an example of the “fringe” even though I too am one of “the people” as are many others — like hispanic youths or single urban mothers or dot-com millionaires or elderly southern black granddads or Korean entrepreneurs (or even Sheryl Crow.) We are not Real Americans.
This fetishization of that other mythical “Real American” seems to stem from a public epiphany that the previous “Dean” of the DC press corps, Joseph Kraft, had almost 40 years ago when confronted with the disconcerting sight of violence in the streets perpetrated by nice boys and girls:
“Are we merely neutral observers, seekers after truth in the public interest? Or do we, as the supporters of Mayor Daley and his Chicago police have charged, have a prejudice of our own?
“The answer, I think is that Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communications field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans–in Middle America. And the results show up not merely in occasional episodes such as the Chicago violence but more importantly in the systematic bias toward young people, minority groups, and the of presidential candidates who appeal to them.
“To get a feel of this bias it is first necessary to understand the antagonism that divides the middle class of this country. On the one hand there are highly educated upper-income whites sure of and brimming with ideas for doing things differently. On the other hand, there is Middle America, the large majority of low-income whites, traditional in their values and on the defensive against innovation.
“The most important organs of and television are, beyond much doubt, dominated by the outlook of the upper-income whites.
“In these circumstances, it seems to me that those of us in the media need to make a special effort to understand Middle America. Equally it seems wise to exercise a certain caution, a prudent restraint, in pressing a claim for a plenary indulgence to be in all places at all times the agent of the sovereign public.”
Joseph Kraft defined “Middle America” as a blue collar or rural white male, “traditional in his values and defensive against innovation.” Ever since then, the denizens of the beltway have deluded themselves into thinking they speak for that “silent majority.” (And what a serendipitous coincidence it was that this happened at the moment of a right wing political ascension that also made a fetish out of the same blue collar white male.) The converse of this, of course, is that they also assume that the “fringe” liberals from the coasts are way out of the mainstream, even to the extent that editors of Time simply make up data to conform to Kraft’s outdated observations.
The Village may not be dead yet.
Update: I should also add this great piece by Josh Marshall from last decade which looks at the same phenomenon from yet another angle. As he puts it, “DC is wired for Republicans.”